587. One Small StepFORMULA: 11:59 + First Contact + The Royale + The Sound of Her Voice
WHY WE LIKE IT: The Mars mission stuff.
WHY WE DON'T: The Voyager stuff.
REVIEW: This episode contains considerable flashback material from the 2032 Mars mission, but not considerable enough. They're the best part of the episode! Unlike 11:59, which seemed to have little to do with Star Trek, One Small Step is at least about a working astronaut, an explorer, lost like Voyager. Phil Morris does an excellent job as John Kelly, making us see what has become bog standard in Star Trek (alien ships, anomalies) as if for the first time. His courage under fire is a lot more engaging than Voyager's posh travails. Everything about early space travel is life and death, but Voyager's mission here is something of a lark - unnecessary risk.
The Voyager sections are especially tedious (perhaps in comparison) with old shticks being trotted out for the Nth time. Seven is being difficult, she has to explain her jokes, she starts a lot of sentences with "as a drone...". Oh, and she learns a lesson about humanity. It's boring because we've seen it all before. As a homage to the space pioneers, it only works when we're actually with Kelly. The crew unfortunately has very little to say that's original (as the Doctor freely admits).
And for all the clichéd beats, Voyager's crew is pretty badly characterized by the script. Chakotay seems to have the Tom Paris role, suddenly a Mars buff from way back and ready to take risks to bring back a "piece of the past", risks that place the crew in great danger. That's not Chakotay. And while I could believe Seven would bring back Kelly's body after "bonding" with him via his logs, her whispered baseball score at the end is too much. Seven makes too big a leap in her humanity here and if we believe this scene, she can't ever find anything trivial ever again.
And yet, it started out so well, with the stardate typed in just like the mission's date at the very beginning. A show set so far from Earth would seem to have little means to explore human history, but the graviton ellipse isn't a bad way to do it. It's technobabble, but a sensible premise nonetheless. I can't say the same of the "dark matter asteroid" however. I'm no expert, I guess, but I thought asteroids were, for the most part, dark matter already. It's dark matter because it doesn't radiate, right? Here, it comes with a massive electromagnetic field that attracts the ellipse. Does that conform to anything even remotely resembling dark matter? I wouldn't spend more than a sentence on this except that the episode attempts to realistically portray the Mars mission, so it's especially jarring when weird science appears.
LESSON: Not all lost astronauts wind up in a casino.
REWATCHABILITY - Medium: A fourth of it I would consider High. The rest is the usual pablum.
Comments
The one on the show was all shimmery. I'm sure it's ridiculous science.
Voyager's writers seem to be thinking of exotic (hence shimmery) matter, but none of the likely candidates to exist are going to make anything that looks like a rock.
Now if the script had said "strange matter" they would have been in business, but unfortunately physics has a tradition of cool things with lame names.